Beijing Olympics: Pope holds public mass on final day of Jordan tour

Tens of thousands of Jordanians greeted Pope Benedict XVI as he prepared to say mass at an open-air football stadium in Amman on Sunday, on the final day of his Holy Land trip to Jordan.

He entered the stadium in his bullet-proof glass-topped popemobile and circled the field once as thousands of people greeted him, singing in Arabic "Yes to love, yes to peace."

Many people held up Jordanian and Vatican flags, while others waved white ribbons in a sign of peace.

The pope will later visit Bethany on the east bank of the River Jordan where Christians believe Jesus was baptised before travelling on to Israel on Monday as he follows his Holy Land pilgrimage in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.

Refaat Badr, spokesman for the Catholic Church in Jordan, said 70,000 people have been invited to attend the mass, and the Jordanian government has issued a decree allowing Christians to take leave to attend papal functions.

On Saturday, the 82-year-old pontiff urged inter-faith reconciliation but disappointed Muslim clerics by failing to offer a new apology for remarks seen as targeting Islam.

In a keynote address to Muslim leaders in Amman's huge Al-Hussein Mosque, he bemoaned the "ideological manipulation of religion" and urged Muslims and Christians to unite as "worshippers of God."

"Certainly, the contradiction of tensions and divisions between the followers of different religious traditions, sadly, cannot be denied," the leader of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics told his audience.

"However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?"

Some clerics were disappointed that his wide-ranging speech made no new apology for a 2006 address in which he quoted a medieval Christian emperor who criticised some teachings of the Prophet Mohammed as "evil and inhuman."

The pontiff apologised at the time for the "unfortunate misunderstanding."

Some Muslim leaders wanted him to go further. "We wanted him to clearly apologise," Sheikh Yusef Abu Hussein, mufti of the southern city of Karak.

But Prince Ghazi bin Mohammed, King Abdullah II's advisor on religious affairs who hosted the pontiff during his mosque visit, was more conciliatory.

"I would like to thank you for expressing regret over the lecture in 2006, which hurt the feelings of Muslims," said Ghazi, whose country has a Christian minority of about 200,000 out of a six-million population.

Pope Benedict did not remove his shoes at the mosque, as is customary in Muslim shrines, but a spokesman insisted he had not been asked to do so as he used a special walkway.

On his arrival in Amman on Friday at the start of his eight-day tour, Benedict underlined his "deep respect" for Islam.

Pressing the theme of reconciliation during a visit on Saturday to Mount Nebo, where Biblical tradition says God showed Moses the Promised Land, Benedict urged Christians and Jews to bridge their divides.

The pope will also visit Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Kambayashi